Infoblox Report Finds IPv6 Demand, Adoption on the Rise

The world is so caught up with cloud computing, virtualization and mobile devices, we’ve almost forgotten about the backbone that makes them all interoperable, networking. Eventually, all these endpoints and nodes will need to be IPv6-compatible. So how are we doing on that? A new study published by network automation company Infoblox and conducted by the Measurement Factory shows IPv6 adoption has grown quite a bit, but you’ll never guess why. Read on for the details …

According to the survey, “IPv6 has increased by 1,900 percent over the past 12 months … primarily attributed to the introduction of support of IPv6 by a single registrar, Go Daddy.” That may be good news for Go Daddy and a good chunk of the Web, but according to the report, there’s still much work to be done. That massive increase is roughly only 25 percent of “.com, .net and .org Internet subdomains.” Eventually, mobile devices and computers will be IPv6-compliant devices and …

“If your external presence only supports IPv4, then the only devices that can communicate with you will be those with IPv4 addresses,” says Cricket Liu, General Manager of the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence. “To the growing population of pure IPv6 devices, you’re invisible.”

The short version of this story is that there’s a huge opportunity here for VARs to support and build out transitional and long-term IPv6 technologies. VARs could add IPv6 transition moves as part of a package deal in a hardware bundle or a promise that all future data center upgrades will include IPv6 support. Plus, IPv6 affects both the SMB and enterprise, so there should be opportunities all around.

What else can VARs do? Naturally, Infoblox suggests they check out Infoblox’s own solutions, but at the least VARs should reach out to their vendors and distributors about IPv6-ready solutions. They’re becoming increasingly popular, but just bubbling up, meaning partners have a golden opportunity to capitalize.